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To increase the interest and engagement of middle school students in science and technology, the InterFaces project has created virtual museum guides that are in use at the Museum of Science, Boston. The characters use natural language interaction and have near photoreal appearance to increase and presents reports from museum staff on visitor reaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we survey different types of Models of culture for virtual humans. Virtual humans are artificial agents that include both a visual human-like body and intelligent cognition driving action of the body. Culture covers a wide range of common knowledge of behavior and communication that can be used in a number of ways including interpreting the meaning of action, establishing identity, expressing meaning, and inference about the performer. We look at several examples of existing cultural models and point out remaining steps for a more full model of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conversational dialogue systems cannot be evaluated in a fully formal manner, because dialogue is heavily dependent on context and current dialogue theory is not precise enough to specify a target output ahead of time. Instead, we evaluate dialogue systems in a semi-formal manner, using human judges to rate the coherence of a conversational character and correlating these judgments with measures extracted from within the system. We present a series of three evaluations of a single conversational character over the course of a year, demonstrating how this kind of evaluation helps bring about an improvement in overall dialogue coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present an implementation of a embodied conversational agent that serves as a virtual tour guide in Second Life. We show how we combined the abilities of a conversational agent with navigation in the world and present some preliminary evaluation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe the dialogue model for the virtual humans developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. The dialogue model contains a rich set of information state and dialogue moves to allow a wide range of behaviour in multimodal, multiparty interaction. We extend this model to enable non-team negotiation, using ideas from social science literature on negotiation and implemented strategies and dialogue moves for this area. We present a virtual human doctor who uses this model to engage in multimodal negotiation dialogue with people from other organisations. The doctor is part of the SASO-ST system, used for training for non-team interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual Humans are artificial characters who look and act like humans, but inhabit a simulated environment. One important aspect of many virtual humans is their communicative dialogue ability. In this paper we outline a methodology for study of dialogue behavior and construction of virtual humans. We also consider three architectures for different types of virtual humans that have been built at the Institute for Creative Technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a model of negotiation for virtual agents that extends previous work to be more human-like and applicable to a broader range of situations, including more than two negotiators with different goals, and negotiating over multiple options. The agents can dynamically change their negotiating strategies based on the current values of several parameters and factors that can be updated in the course of the negotiation. We have implemented this model and done preliminary evaluation within a prototype training system and a three-party negotiation with two virtual humans and one human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaze plays a large number of cognitive, communicative and affective roles in face-to-face human interaction. To build a believable virtual human, it is imperative to construct a gaze model that generates realistic gaze behaviors. However, it is not enough to merely imitate a person's eye movements. The gaze behaviors should reflect the internal states of the virtual human and users should be able to derive them by observing the behaviors. In this paper, we present a gaze model driven by the cognitive operations; the model processes the virtual human's reasoning, dialog management, and goals to generate behaviors that reflect the agent's inner thoughts. It has been implemented in our virtual human system and operates in real-time. The gaze model introduced in this paper was originally designed and developed by Jeff Rickel but has since been extended by the authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model for simulating cultural differences in the conversational behavior of virtual agents. The model provides parameters for differences in proxemics, gaze and overlap in turn taking. We present a review of literature on these factors and show results of a study where native speakers of North American English, Mexican Spanish and Arabic were asked to rate the realism of the simulations generated based on different cultural parameters with respect to their culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of designing virtual characters that support speech-based interactions in a limited domain. Previously we have shown that classification can be an effective and robust tool for selecting appropriate in-domain responses. In this paper, we consider the problem of dealing with out-of-domain user questions. We introduce a taxonomy of out-of-domain response types. We consider three classification architectures for selecting the most appropriate out-of-domain responses. We evaluate these architectures and show that they significantly improve the quality of the response selection making the user's interaction with the virtual character more natural and engaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background characters in virtual environments do not require the same amount of processing that is usually required by main characters, however we still want simulation that is more believable than random behavior. We describe an algorithm that generates behavior for background characters involved in conversation that supports dynamic changes to conversation group structure. We present an evaluation of this algorithm and make suggestions on how to further improve believability of the simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a model of conversation strategies implemented in virtual humans designed to help people learn negotiation skills. We motivate and discuss these strategies and their use to allow a virtual human to engage in complex adversarial negotiation with a human trainee. Choice of strategy depends on both the personality of the agent and assessment of the likelihood that the negotiation can be beneficial. Execution of strategies can be performed by choosing specific dialogue behaviors such as whether and how to respond to a proposal. Current assessment of the value of the topic, the utility of the strategy, and affiliation toward the other conversants can be used to dynamically change strategies throughout the course of a conversation. Examples will be given from the SASO-ST project, in which a trainee learns to negotiate by interacting with virtual humans who employ these strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This poster reports the results of two experiments to test a personality framework for virtual characters. We use the Tactical Questioning dialogue system architecture (TACQ) [1] as a testbed for this effort. Characters built using the TACQ architecture can be used by trainees to practice their questioning skills by engaging in a role-play with a virtual human. The architecture supports advanced behavior in a questioning setting, including deceptive behavior, simple negotiations about whether to answer, tracking subdialogues for offers/threats, grounding behavior, and maintenance of the affective state of the virtual human. Trainees can use different questioning tactics in their sessions. In order for the questioning training to be effective, trainees should have experience of interacting with virtual humans with different personalities, who react in different ways to the same questioning tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]